Rejected names for the kid

As in: Prognostication

Im-possible names, offered jokingly and rejected sternly, for the impending Riley:

• Smileton—it could go by "Smiley Riley"; gender-neutral.
• Envy—sounds cool but was rejected for being one of the seven deadly sins.
• Friendly—embodies values we'd like the lil shaver to have, but was rejected anyhow.
• Hamish—Scottish detectives do not namesakes make. Bonus: a future dog, like a corgi or a collie or a scottie, can have this name.
• Pubert.
• Bernard, Henry, Cletus, Leo, Crysanthia—all of my grandfather's syblings' names were tossed in one fell swoop.
• Pants—dismissed along with most other nouns.

The future is now (or) Sharks with Friggin Lasers

As in: Prognostication

Even sharks deserve a warm meal.

Or dolphins, rather. Craziness, thy name is the US military.

Movie meme

As in: Prognostication

Clancy asks: Who would you like to play you in a movie based on your life?

But come on, who would probably really end up playing you in a movie based on your life?

Update (8 Sept):
Rob suggests Alan Tudyk. Good call.

The future is now!

As in: Prognostication

Warren Ellis points out that In the future, all jockeys will be robotic...

Camel racing is to be transformed as a spectator sport in the United Arab Emirates with robot riders taking the place of child jockeys. (New Scientist)

Seeing the future ... of the web

As in: Prognostication

So the April Fools Comics got me thinking:

In one of the classes I took with him, Ulmer led us in using divining tools such as the I-Ching (I used the Greek Marketplace) as heuretic objects with which to read the internet (Zach's project from such a class). What I carry away from the divining projects we attempted was the drive to "read" the universe by means of this other object, which mixed things up and returns them to us in new combinations, which we understand through metaphor.

Of course, the Ouija board becomes the least exciting version of these because it uses letters--if it spells a nonsense word, you're stuck. The solution to that is perhaps to use whole words or phrases, which will then re-invoke the metaphorical. My random comic kind of works like that.

The question, then, is to ask how this becomes research and not just play. I was talking about this with a colleague here after my presentation at PCA, which went okay, but seemed to leave the audience in a confused state. Things to think about with this kind of project:

• Does the internet push scholars toward being artists? (Amy Hawkins' question from our coffee-chat.) Vis jrice's comic-blog entries.
• Does play count as research? LT, MS and I wrote about this a bit before.
• If digital writing moves the burden for argument from the writer to the reader (and I'll happily acknowledge that it may not), how does one present one's digital research? Academic research as database writing becomes the accumulation and juxtaposition of ideas, perhaps.
• Is random-ness funny?

Concept comics

As in: Prognostication

Warren Ellis has produced four comics under an interesting premise. He writes:

Years ago, I sat down and thought about what adventure comics might've looked like today if superhero comics hadn't have happened. If, in fact, the pulp tradition of Weird Thrillers had jumped straight into comics form without mutating into the superhero subgenre we know today.

...

The other day, I was thinking about response songs. Rappers taking shots at each other, covers that answer something in the original, art made in reaction to art. Which, you kind of hope, is not the same as being reactionary.

The small music labels 555 Recordings and Dark Beloved Cloud have singles clubs. People play down the importance of singles these days -- they don't sell the way they used to, downloads bother the music business -- but I love them. Sometimes one song contained on one object is all you need to move the axis of the world. Self-contained and saying all that needs to be said.

Ellis produced four comics, released under the imprint Apparat. They suggest an alternate history of comics--what would comics look like today if superhero comics had not emerged in the thirties? I particularly like Frank Ironwise.

I think the apparat books would make a great course assignment. As always happens when I'm a short spit away from a semester (starts Monday), I have ideas for "something completely different." Thus, I give you a future research arc for one of my Composition 2 courses (feel free to poach):

In Warren Ellis' Apparat comics, he considers what the media of his discipline, comics, would look like if one of the major moments in the medium did not happen. His comics draw on an older tradition and project into the future the premises they suppose. During this course, we will use Ellis' project as a model to produce three small hypertext "singles" that explore your discipline in a divergent future. These explorations will ask what if a key moment in your discipline had never occurred? What would your discipline look like now?

The course would use the Ellis books, of course, as well as a history of comics to explore how Ellis made these conclusions. We'd use Rice's Writing About Cool as our rhetoric and perhaps read The Man in the High Tower to talk about how alternate histories might or might not work.

I got you babe

As in: Prognostication

So there was no shadow this morning here in Oak Park. I suppose it depends what time the groundhog looks—if he checked right now, there'd be a shadow, I think.

You'd think groundhog.org would be prepared to handle a higher traffic load today, but I'm getting timeout messages.